LAVAL, Que. — Exactly one decade ago, Rocco Sollecito was part of a group of six men who seemed untouchable.
The six had been chosen to take charge of the Mafia in Montreal while its leader, Vito Rizzuto, was incarcerated in the United States.
Now, following Sollecito’s brazen killing on Friday — in broad daylight and within sight of Laval police headquarters — only two of those six men remain alive and they both were recently returned to federal penitentiaries out of concerns for their safety.
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FileRocco Sollecito
Police sources say investigators have evidence that a man, described as being in his 30s and dressed entirely in black, was waiting at a city bus shelter and opened fire into the passenger-side window of Sollecito’s white BMW sport utility vehicle when it stopped at a stop sign at about 8:30 a.m. Several shots were fired into the vehicle and Sollecito, who was alone, was declared dead after being taken to a hospital.
The shooter appeared to know Sollecito’s morning routine, one source said, adding that, besides the shooter, investigators were also trying to track down the driver of a vehicle that moments after the shooting appeared to slow down as it approached Sollecito’s SUV and then continued in the same direction the shooter is believed to have fled on foot.
Everything changed for Sollecito and those five other men in November 2006, when they were the main players arrested in Project Colisée, a Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit investigation that struck at the very heart of the Rizzuto organization. All six eventually pleaded guilty to various charges and received sentences of varying lengths. The investigation, coupled with Vito Rizzuto’s absence, left the organization in a weakened state.
The first of the six to go was Vito Rizzuto’s brother-in-law, Paolo Renda, 70, who was abducted off a street in May 2010, by men who appeared to be pretending to be plainclothes police officers. Renda has not been seen since and, in 2013, his family sought to have him declared dead.
Six months after Renda was abducted, Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo (Zio Cola) Rizzuto, 86, was killed in his home.
In March 1, 2016, Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano, 52, one of the younger members of that six-person leadership committee, was fatally shot in Laval, not far from where Sollecito’s was shot.
Giordano had only recently reached his statutory release date on a 15-year prison term.
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Marcos Townsend/Postmedia News/FileRocco Sollecito is detained by RCMP officers in Montreal in November 2006.
The other two men who were part of that 2006 group and who have survived are Giordano’s close friend, Francesco (Chit) Del Balso, 46, and Francesco Arcadi, 62, a close lieutenant to Vito Rizzuto for years before Rizzuto died of natural causes in 2013. Both received sentences similar to Giordano’s and were released earlier this year when they also reached their statutory release dates. Following Giordano’s murder, both men were returned to federal penitentiaries out of concern for their safety.
Sollecito received a shorter sentence than Arcadi, Del Balso and Giordano, in part, because the evidence gathered in Colisée indicated he steered away from the large-scale drug trafficking in which the other men were involved.
Sollecito’s expertise was bookmaking. On Sept. 24, 2004, with the Colisée investigation well underway, police secretly recorded a conversation between Giordano and Sollecito inside the Mafia’s headquarters, a café in St-Léonard, Que. They were lamenting how the long summer had deprived their bookmaking operation of NHL games.
According to a summary of the conversation that was later presented as evidence in court, Giordano longed for the NHL season because of its steady stream of games offered on a nightly basis. Sollecito was recorded saying that the hockey bookmaking operation “never loses.”
During another recorded conversation on May 23, 2005, Sollecito explained how the committee worked to a Mafioso who was visiting from Italy. Traditionally, a Mafia clan operates with one leader and the visitor from Italy couldn’t figure out why the senior leaders; Sollecito, Nicolo Rizzuto, Arcadi and Renda, were splitting their profits evenly, with a fifth share going to Vito Rizzuto even if he was behind bars in the U.S.
Renda’s abduction and Nicolo Rizzuto’s slaying in 2010 were the clearest signs the Rizzuto organization was under attack from a group led by Salvatore Montagna, a now-deceased mob boss from New York, that tried to take control of the Mafia in Montreal.
On Friday, Lt. Jason Allard, a spokesman for the Sûreté Québec, said it was too early in the investigation to begin discussing possible motives behind the shooting.
Vito Rizzuto made a serious effort to find the man suspected of killing his eldest son and wanted him captured alive to make him suffer, a recently released court document alleges.
The document, part of an affidavit prepared to help police obtain search warrants in a recent investigation into organized crime, reveals what police learned from an informant sometime in August 2014, shortly after street gang leader Ducarme (Kenny) Joseph, 46, was fatally shot the night of Aug. 1, 2014.
For years, police sources had described Joseph as a suspect in the murder of Rizzuto’s eldest son, Nick (The Ritz) Rizzuto. Vito Rizzuto was incarcerated in the U.S. in December 2009 when his son was killed. The Mob boss returned to Canada in 2012 and died of natural causes on Dec. 23, 2013.
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TVADucarme 'Kenny' Joseph
Joseph was fatally shot eight months after Vito Rizzuto died, but according to the informant quoted in the affidavit: “Kenny’s death was a contract from the (Mafia).”
“Vito wanted him alive to make him suffer,” the same informant, who is identified only as J, told a police investigator during a telephone call. “There were about 10 teams that were searching for Kenny.”
Several other parts of what the informant told the police detective in August 2014 have been redacted from the copy of the affidavit that was recently made public following a request by several media. A publication ban on what is contained in the document was partially lifted by Quebec Court Judge Thierry Nadon.
Joseph was killed near the intersection of St-Michel Blvd. and Michel-Ange St. in northern Montreal — reportedly close to his mother’s home — and no one has been charged in connection with the slaying.
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Marcos Townsend / PostmediaMontreal Police detectives at the scene of the shooting of Nick Rizzuto Jr. on Dec. 28, 2009
Before he died, the influential street gang leader appeared to keep a very low profile in Montreal after an attempt was made on his life just months after Nick Rizzuto was killed.
The possible motive behind Nick Rizzuto’s murder has never been made clear, but Joseph was also alleged by police sources to have been a suspect in the murder of Frederico Del Peschio, a 59-year-old close associate of Vito Rizzuto’s who was gunned down near Del Peschio’s restaurant in Montreal on Aug. 21, 2009.
According to evidence presented during a court hearing in 2010, Joseph was informed, by a police detective, on Sept. 9, 2009, that investigators had credible information there was a contract on his life.
All 193,000 workers with access to restricted areas at Canada’s sensitive airports and seaports are being quietly run through a police database each and every day — a new system called “perpetual vetting” — in a push to extinguish “the inside threat” of criminal infiltration.
The constant police checks, alongside national security searches by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), background reports from the RCMP and foreign history verification by Immigration Canada has pushed the number of employees stripped of their security clearance by Transport Canada over links to the Mafia, Hells Angels, drug traffickers and other “adverse” people or activities to record-high levels, the National Post has learned.
“It is virtually real-time,” said Guy Morgan, director of the Security Screening Program with Transport Canada, proud of the suite of security checks now at his disposal.
“When I come in Monday morning, I know who’s been charged over the weekend. This allows us to then pull those files and re-take a look at the security profiles to determine if anything has changed.
“We’re trying to protect the transportation infrastructure, the employees that work here, the users and the surrounding communities against the inside threat,” he said.
The increasing breadth and depth of security screening, however, also brings accusations of unfair over-reach, with a wide definition of what is a threat and narrow tolerance for someone explaining it away.
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Justin Tang for National PostGuy Morgan, Transport Canada's director of security screening programs, says a new program to determine if transportation workers are security threats is “virtually real-time.”
In this dispute the stakes are high: the vulnerability of our sensitive air and sea ports on one hand and the livelihood and privacy of the workers.
Terrorism and organized crime are the program’s priority targets, but a wide range of activities raise red flags, even shaking hands with a member of the Hells Angels in a bar.
Transport Canada’s Security Screening Program started in 1986 in response to the Air India bombing. In 1985, a bomb concealed in luggage on a flight from Montreal destroyed a jetliner over the Atlantic, killing all 329 people aboard.
The program has evolved substantially since.
“The purpose of the program is to try to prevent unlawful acts of interference with aviation. And there is also a marine clearance program,” said Morgan.
Air and seaports have long been key transit points for smuggling and sensitive targets for international terrorists. Access by employees have been exploited to further criminal aims. It’s what Moran calls the “inside threat.”
Employees who need access to restricted areas in an airport — everyone working beyond the security gates for passengers, including baggage handlers, aircraft mechanics, airline employees, cleaning staff, store clerks and food vendors — requires a restricted area identity card (RAIC). To get a RAIC, they must have security clearance from Transport Canada. There is a similar system for marine port workers, although the restricted areas at seaports are a significantly smaller portion of the port, which leads to its own problems.
The RCMP started sharing criminal intelligence for background checks with Transport Canada in 2009. That year, 16 airport workers lost their security clearance, double the number from the year before. The tally has climbed almost every year since, reaching 110 in 2015 — a record figure over 10 years of data provided to the National Post by Transport Canada.
Perpetual vetting is the latest tool.
Transport Canada was granted access to computer terminals of the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), the national law enforcement database. CPIC is a massive, constantly updating omnibus database of police information from police forces across Canada, including criminal convictions, charges, intelligence and surveillance information and much more.
When I come in Monday morning, I know who’s been charged over the weekend
An automated system of checking every employee who has security clearance each day began on Nov. 26, 2014, Morgan said.
The number of applicants refused clearance at airports jumped significantly the next year, from 70 to 110. In just the first half of 2016, the number almost equaled that: 98. Cancellations of clearance for current airport employees almost doubled, from 24 to 42.
At marine ports, clearance refusals jumped from 26 to 45 the year after perpetual vetting’s launch; cancellations climbed from 16 to 20.
“We review everything — if there’s a hit, we review it and make an assessment,” said Morgan.
The push, however, also is bringing a flurry of challenges from those banished.
Many workers who lose their clearance leave quietly. Morgan said the longest criminal record of an applicant for a security clearance was 78 criminal convictions. (He was denied.)
The only recourse for airport workers objecting to a security revocation is a legal challenge in the Federal Court. The increase in revocations brings increased court battles.
At least a dozen security revocation appeals have been decided recently by the Federal Court involving former workers at Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal airports. At least 32 others are before the court.
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Scott Dunlop/Postmedia/FileThe Ceres shipping-container terminal in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
For example:
• Joseph Rossi was a manager of an airline food service company at Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. His first security clearance was issued in 1998 and renewed every five years.
An RCMP report on Rossi said he had ties to two co-workers involved in importing drugs through the airport and a “suspected” association to Giuseppe Torre’s group, which brought in large quantities of drugs through the airport with the Rizzuto Mafia family.
An investigation led to the seizure of 11 kilograms of cocaine and the arrest of co-workers and others, part of the massive Project Colisée that hit the Montreal Mafia.
Rossi complained, saying he had no convictions, had only innocent contact with his dirty co-workers and was unaware of drug smuggling at the airport. His appeal was rejected.
“A security clearance is not a right, but a privilege. It is reasonable for an individual to expect that his personal associations would be relevant to the granting or maintenance of a security clearance,” ruled Justice Richard Bell.
• Zahid Sattar had been employed by Securiguard Services at Vancouver airport since 1999, with access to restricted areas since 2004. His clearance was cancelled in 2015.
Sattar’s background check noted 10 people he associated with had ties to criminal organizations and had committed crimes, including drug trafficking, homicide, assault and possession of a prohibited weapon.
In 2005, he was named as the new owner of a bar in Surrey, B.C., “known to be frequented by Hells Angels’ members” and was seen at a Hells Angels event at the bar, Transport Canada was told. In 2010, RCMP officers caught him and a man linked to an Indo-Canadian gang trying to evade police; and in 2011, he attended the stag for a UN Gang member.
Sattar said he was not involved with any criminal activity. He said he paid a deposit with the intent of buying the bar, but did not complete the sale.
• Robinder Singh Sidhu was employed as a station attendant dealing with cargo at Vancouver airport, where he began work in 1989, first with Canadian Airlines then Air Canada.
He was arrested by the RCMP in 2014 as part of a heroin smuggling probe and accused of using his access to move boxes in a secure area. Police said he admitted to moving goods, but said he thought they only contained steroids. He was not charged.
Police seized 37 kilos of heroin. At least one of those charged, another Air Canada employee, was an associate of Sidhu, police said. Sidhu denied knowingly aiding a heroin ring.
His court appeal was denied.
• Rajkamal Singh Mangat, 39, had worked full-time for Air Canada since 1997 as an aircraft maintenance engineer, including working on the prime minister’s jet.
In 2003, Mangat was charged with assault and mischief after causing a disturbance at a fast food restaurant, although both charges were stayed; in 2008, he was charged with theft under $5,000 after a shoplifting incident, but the charge was withdrawn; that same year, he was charged with threatening to slit the throats of two co-workers but the charges were withdrawn when he agreed to a peace bond; in 2012, he was charged with threatening tenants of a residence, but the charges were also stayed.
In his defence, Mangat said none of the incidents were as bad as they looked: the shoplifter was a former wife, his brother made the threats in the first incident and he lied to court to protect him, and the second set of threats involved him yelling at squatters.
His security clearance was denied and his appeal to the court unsuccessful.
The minister is entitled to err on the side of public safety
• Li Gu Li, who worked as a groomer with Sunwest at Calgary International Airport, was first granted security clearance in 2007. She was fired in 2015 when her security access was revoked.
Her RCMP report said she was “very close” to someone associated with a Vietnamese organized crime gang who was “known to police for trafficking drugs,” although two sets of drug charges against this person were stayed. She was also said to be associating with a second person police linked to drug production and police saw her car parked at a house in Abbotsford, B.C., where a marijuana grow op was found.
Li said she did not know there was a grow op in the basement of a house where she rented a room.
A judge dismissed her appeal.
Some links to crime are more tenuous than others. The Post previously reported on a worker whose clearance was cancelled because her former husband later joined the Hells Angels and on another worker who was found by U.S. police near the border with 12 kilos of marijuana and $353,430 in U.S. currency.
Most of those seeking the court’s redress have failed.
Transport Canada has wide discretion and doesn’t need criminal convictions or corroborating evidence.
“The minister is entitled to err on the side of public safety,” Justice James Russell wrote in deciding Mangat’s case.
There have been a few notable loses.
Juliet Meyler won her appeal last year after her security clearance was yanked, costing her two ground-handling jobs at Toronto’s Pearson airport.
The allegations were potentially serious: police alleged an association with the “group leader of a drug importation ring” at the airport and she was a suspect in a drug importation probe in 2007 -09.
Meyler was never told who the “group leader” was. She said she had no involvement in drug smuggling and had no idea who the leader might be. Authorities could not disclose specifics to protect an informant and because the investigation was continuing.
That secrecy helped to save her. Noting such cases were rare, Justice Donald Rennie ruled Meyler “was unable to respond to the case against her” and her revocation was ordered to be reconsidered.
Last month, Ayaan Farah won a similar case.
Her security clearance to work at Toronto airport as a customer service agent with U.S. Airways was cancelled after an RCMP report said her car was seen leaving the cemetery during a gang member’s funeral in 2012; she was not in the vehicle.
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THE CANADIAN PRESS/Colin Perkel/FileAyaan Farah
She was also seen in 2011 with a long-standing member of the Dixon Crew, a street gang based in Toronto’s west end. The man has convictions for 11 serious offences, including drug trafficking, home invasions and counterfeit money and involved in gun trafficking, the report said.
Farah objected.
“Toronto police is falsely accusing me of having ties to gangsters. I am a law-abiding citizen with no criminal convictions,” she complained.
She asked for details on who the gang member is so she could defend herself but was not told.
“I ask that the police clear my name,” she told Transport Canada. Instead, her security clearance was cancelled.
Justice Susan Elliott ruled, “Farah was simply not provided with enough information to allow her to make any kind of meaningful response,” and ordered a reconsideration.
Farah’s lawyer, Mitchell Worsoff, said his client’s case highlights problems in Transport Canada’s aggressive approach.
“Some people deserve to lose their clearance, and that’s fair, because travelling must be safe and some people are doing things they shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “But some people are being swept up by this vast net that is cast, all because they know somebody with a criminal record or are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Innocent people get caught up in it.”
Sukanya Pillay, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, called for the program to be more discerning.
“We have serious concerns with this practice — it smacks of guilt by association and negatively impacts people who can lose their job despite having done nothing wrong and posing no threat,” she said.
“Ultimately, we can’t abandon fairness, natural justice, and even our employment laws over fear-based conflations.”
Morgan said his department’s decisions have been taken to court 134 times that he knows of; the government has lost 10 cases.
“Every court case, whether we’re successful or not, we review it and we’re constantly looking to tweak the program,” he said. “It is a very difficult program in terms of we’re constantly grappling with grey… very few cases are cut and dried.”
After dramatic evidence from a killer who turned his back on the Mafia’s code of silence, two mobsters in Sicily were sentenced to life in prison for killing two gangsters from Canada, one of whom holds a mythic place in the underworld as such a dangerous man he made even hardened criminals quake.
Juan Ramon Fernandez, 56, had been deported from Canada for his mob antics when he was cut down in a fusillade of bullets in 2013. Dying beside him in the ambush was Fernando Pimentel, 36, of Mississauga, who was visiting Italy to help his exiled boss.
On Tuesday, after a lengthy stop-and-start trial, two brothers — who had also once lived in Canada — were found guilty of double murder, although Pietro Scaduto, 51, and Salvatore Scaduto, 54, deny their involvement.
The third gunman who shot Fernandez and Pimentel on April 9, 2013, became a cooperating witness and gave hours of detailed testimony in court. Giuseppe Carbone, 47, who, like the others, previously lived in Canada, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
“Why were they killed, these two?” Fabio Marino, chairman of the Court of Assizes in Palermo, asked Carbone earlier at trial.
“There was a Mafia war in Canada,” Carbone answered.
The backdrop was the rebellion against Vito Rizzuto’s control of the Mafia in Montreal after Rizzuto was extradited to the United States in 2006 for three gangland murders. The rebellion was led by Raynald Desjardins, Carbone told court.
“He was the one who had the ongoing war with Rizzuto,” he said.
Fernandez had torn loyalties. He was close to both Rizzuto and Desjardins and owed much to each of them.
Desjardins had first brought Fernandez into a higher echelon of crime but it was Rizzuto who gave him his true power. Fernandez claimed Rizzuto even inducted him as a “made man” of the Mafia — despite him being Spanish not Italian.
Fernandez’s sin was his failure to chose a side: He was “like a priest who visits all the churches,” Carbone was told.
The order to kill Fernandez came from Canada, although he did not receive it directly. He is not a mafioso, he said, he only worked with Mafia members.
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HandoutPietro, left, and Salvatore Scaduto, right.
“Certainly Vito Rizzuto or Desjardins, what’s his name, did not call me to do the killings,” Carbone said. “Rizzuto didn’t call me to do the murders, Raynald Desjardins didn’t call me to do the murders; they called them (his co-accused). So they know who they were dealing with, I do not. I was an outsider.”
Once the order was given, Carbone and the two men on trial plotted the murder of a man known for his physical strength and determination. Fernandez was a martial arts expert, worked out every day, and was a stone-cold killer. In Montreal and Toronto, where he was also known by the name Joe Bravo, he instilled fear in even hardened criminals.
Carbone said he stole the key to his cousin’s construction yard in an out-of-the-way lane in Bagheria, near Palermo. There was a lockable gate and fence that surrounded a concrete building and yard.
After two failed attempts to get Fernandez to the workshop, Pietro Scaduto convinced him to come with the promise of a great deal on a load of marijuana. Fernandez loved a good deal.
“So it was a very easy lure,” Carbone said.
Salvatore Scaduto was hiding in a dog’s kennel just inside the yard. Carbone was in the workshop. Pietro was to unlock and open the gate for Fernandez when he arrived. He had a gun hidden by the gatepost he was to pick up when closing the gate.
Fernandez arrived with Pimentel driving.
Pimentel was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a henchman recruited by Fernandez in Canada; he was visiting Sicily to help his boss push his way into the mob landscape in the very birthplace of the Mafia.
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Adrian Humphreys/National PostThe gated compound on the outskirts of Bagheria, Sicily, where Fernandez and Pimentel were gunned down in an ambush in 2013.
As their rental car pulled in, Salvatore burst out from his hiding spot early, before his brother had a chance to close the iron gate. It made for a frantic ambush. Pimentel opened the car door as if to flee or fight back but was met by gunfire. Fernandez reached over his body and tried to drive away.
“Rei was driving like a madman,” Carbone said, using Fernandez’s nickname in Sicily. Pietro was struck by the car, injuring his shoulder. The gunmen rushed to the car firing furiously.
“I turn and see Rei on the floor, arms wide,” Carbone said. “He was almost in disbelief.”
Fernandez looked up at his attackers and said, “Sal, you too,” Carbone testified. (Previously, he said Fernandez’s final words were, “Why, Pete, why?”)
Pietro then shot him in the head with a pistol.
The two bodies were loaded into Fernandez’s car and driven to a remote illegal dump. Pietro grabbed the victims by their arms and Carbone by their legs as they hoisted them out of the car and dragged them by their belts into long grass.
The bodies were dumped in a shallow grave and set them ablaze. The car was then driven to a different location and also set on fire to destroy evidence.
He still has nightmares about it, Carbone said.
“These memories don’t do me so much good,” he said.
Unable to resist a bit of profit, however, before the bodies were burned, Carbone slipped the expensive watch off Fernandez’s wrist. It had been a gift to him from Rizzuto and was one of the few items he brought with him from Canada.
Carbone was later caught trying to sell the watch, leading to his arrest. He agreed to help police with their investigation and to testify against his co-accused, becoming a “pentito” in Italian parlance.
Carbone led police to the victims’ charred bodies in May 2013.
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Adrian Humphreys/National PostLt.-Col. Fabio Bottino, head of Palermo’s anti-Mafia police, far right, testifies in court in Palermo at the trial for Pietro and Salvatore Scaduto.
TORONTO — For a killer and alleged Mafia boss devoted to an outlaw life, Vincenzo “Jimmy” DeMaria has a strong affinity for turning to the courts to fight for his rights. The Toronto businessman, named as one of Ontario’s most influential mobsters, has won another case, this one against the Parole Board of Canada for keeping him in prison.
The Federal Court has ordered the parole board to reconsider DeMaria’s parole application at a new hearing.
DeMaria, 62, is on lifetime parole because of a second-degree murder conviction, a conditional freedom that has, periodically, been yanked when police allege he strayed too close to outlaw friends.
His 1982 murder conviction came after he shot a man during a confrontation over a $2,000 debt. At trial he said he acted in self defence but evidence showed his victim was shot seven times in the back. He was released on parole in 1992.
Since then he has run a financial services business.
Authorities claim — but have not proven in court — that he progressed up the ranks of the ’Ndrangheta, the proper name of the Mafia that formed in the southern Italy region of Calabria.
DeMaria was named in court documents in Italy in 2010 as one of seven clan bosses controlling organized crime in the Greater Toronto Area.
He has denied the allegations, previously telling the National Post: “I really don’t know where these allegations came from. I’m still dumbfounded.”
His most recent arrest came on Nov. 14, 2013, when the province’s Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement Squad arrested him at his Mississauga home.
Based on “reliable and persuasive” information “provided by numerous police agencies,” the parole board found he had violated parole conditions that prohibit him from associating with anyone known to be involved in crime.
The board found he breached that condition when he attended two family weddings, one on Feb. 25, 2012, and the other on June 23, 2012; some of the guests were deemed to be mobsters. The board also heard allegations he was implicated in various criminal investigations and activities since 2001.
The board revoked his parole on June 18, 2014, declaring him an “undue risk to public safety.”
He appealed that decision to the board’s appeal division, which upheld it, and then appealed to the Federal Court of Canada.
DeMaria complained he was not given details of the allegations made against him by police; that he was refused a third postponement of his hearing; and his request for an oral hearing was denied.
Judge Catherine Kane agreed the board was not procedurally fair to DeMaria when it denied him an oral hearing to respond to the police allegations and to address the credibility findings against him.
A new parole hearing will be scheduled.
DeMaria has had several judicial wins over the years in lawsuits and legal complaints over his treatment. His appeals and suits are usually well funded and often backed by multiple lawyers and private investigation firms.
The previous occasion he was arrested for alleged parole breaches, in 2013, the board later dismissed the police allegations and he then sued the Correctional Service of Canada, seeking $350,000 in compensation. The suit, filed in 2011, has not yet been decided.
Even while he was imprisoned on his original murder charge, DeMaria twice fought cases that helped change prison practices.
He filed a suit after he was transferred back to a maximum-security prison in the 1980s based on a suspicion he smuggled cyanide into prison. When he faced no discipline or charge and no cyanide was ever found, he took the warden to court and won a transfer back to medium-security.
Another time he was transferred back to maximum-security after he telephoned a Liberal MP to complain about prison conditions. He again took the prison to court and forced a reversal of his transfer and a judicial rebuke against the warden.
Although this most recent court victory allows him another hearing to press his case for freedom, it was not a ruling that cleared up concerns over what danger DeMaria poses.
“Rather, it focuses only on the duty of procedural fairness owed by the board to Mr. DeMaria in the board’s decision-making process,” Kane said in her ruling.
Michael Mandelcorn, a Kingston lawyer who argued the case on DeMaria’s behalf, said he could not discuss the decision until he has spoken to his client.
Two stolen Vincent Van Gogh paintings found by police in a Mafia lair in Italy in September will soon return to their home in Amsterdam from where they were stolen in a spectacular heist in 2002.
Originally expected to be held as evidence for future lengthy trials, a court in Naples released the paintings from legal attachment on Thursday after sentencing — in absentia — the drug baron in whose cottage the masterpieces were found to 18 years.
The two works appear to be in reasonably good shape after their harrowing 14-year travels through the underworld, although both are missing their frames and show some signs of damage, according to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
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Ciro Fusco/ANSA via AP, fileIn this Friday, Sept. 30 2016 file photo, the recovered painting 'Seascape at Scheveningen' by Vincent Van Gogh, is shown during a press conference in Naples, Italy.
“It’s great news: we can now focus fully on preparing for the paintings to come home. The two canvases will be formally handed over in the near future. A precise date hasn’t been fixed yet, but it’s expected to happen quickly,” said the museum’s director Axel Rüger.
“We’re especially grateful to the Italian authorities for achieving something we almost thought would never happen. We can’t wait to place the two lost works back in our museum’s collection.”
Van Gogh’s “Seascape at Scheveningen,” painted in 1882, and “Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen” painting from 1884 to 1885, are expected to again be on public display in the museum as soon as possible.
It is believed the works, now made far more famous because of their underworld lineage, will make a brief public display in Naples before they are returned, but authorities would not confirm this.
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Ciro Fusco/ANSA via AP, FileIn this Friday, Sept. 30 2016 file photo, the painting 'Congregation Leaving The Reformed Church of Nuenen' by Vincent Van Gogh, is shown during a press conference in Naples, Italy. Two paintings by Vincent van Gogh that were stolen in 2002 from the Amsterdam museum that is named for the Dutch master and recovered last year by Italian police are set to be returned.
Italian police investigating drug trafficking by a Mafia clan based near Naples found the two valuable masterpieces during raids after a tip from a cooperating witness, police said.
Investigators were probing cocaine trafficking by members of the Amato-Pagano clan, said by authorities to be among the most dangerous drug trafficking clans in the Camorra, one of Italy’s Mafia organizations based in the region around Naples.
The paintings were recovered in the cottage in Castellammare di Stabia connected to Raffaele Imperiale, accused of being one of the Camorra clan’s prodigious drug barons, called a “supernarco” in Italy. Imperiale built links between the clan and South American drug producers to import cocaine to Europe, authorities said.
Although a fugitive, he was sentenced this week to 18 years for drug offenses, Italian media reported. He is believed to have fled to Dubai where he has business interests.
The seizure of assets by the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s national financial crimes police force, also included several properties, buildings and a small plane. Officers found a hidden bunker behind a mirrored wall of a gym.
The theft of the paintings was considered one of the biggest art heists of modern times. Thieves entered from the roof of the Van Gogh Museum, bypassing security and cameras.
When an alarm was triggered, the well-prepared thieves used a ladder to climb to an upper window, smash it and escape. The two thieves were later arrested after their DNA was found at the scene, but the paintings were not recovered until October’s raid.
“It is excellent news that the paintings will shortly be returning to the Netherlands. Everyone, both young and old, should soon be able to enjoy these works again at the Van Gogh Museum,” said Jet Bussemaker, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science.
“My compliments to all the parties who have worked so hard to make this happen.”
A spate of recent Montreal-area arsons linked to organized crime suggests the battle for Mafia leadership in Quebec remains fractured, experts say.
What is likely, they say, is the era that saw charismatic peacemaker Vito Rizzuto rule for three decades will be replaced by something altogether different.
Author and university lecturer Antonio Nicaso said the Mafia will regenerate through the conflicts and death. What will emerge, he suggests, is a structure that is more democratic and open to joint ventures with other criminal groups.
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Allen McInnis / Postmedia The site of a fire that gutted a neighbourhood mall in the Vimont district of Laval
“They will find another type of organizational structure to put in place,” Nicaso said. “It won’t be the same type of organization that controlled Montreal for 30 years, a type of Mafia monarchy that controlled everything with a charismatic boss.”
Rizzuto, who died of natural causes in 2013, was viewed as a unifying underworld force, and instability has been the order of the day since his time in a U.S. prison and his death.
Andre Cedilot, an ex-journalist who writes about organized crime, says the battle now appears to pit Calabrian clans that are battling for power against the last remnants of the Rizzuto loyalists, many of whom are Sicilian. The Calabrians are being assisted by Ontario-based groups.
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Phil Carpenter / PostmediaVito Rizzuto is taken from a Montreal police station in 2004
Cedilot says there is a move to seek a more equitable division of territory and rackets through partnerships with street gangs and the re-emerging Hells Angels.
“For sure, it’s changing because the clans that were all-powerful, like the Rizzuto clan, we can say they are in the process of disappearing,” said Cedilot.
The various arsons this year, including one that levelled a strip mall in Laval, followed a handful of high-profile killings last year.
Lorenzo Giordano, described as a Rizzuto underboss, was killed last March, while Rocco Sollecito, a former Rizzuto right-hand man according to police documents, was slain in May. Another ex-Rizzuto associate was killed in October.
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Allen McInnis / PostmediaFuneral home staff carry the Vito Rizzuto's casket during his funeral Monday, December 30, 2013
At least three attempts to reorganize the leadership structure have failed in recent years — the last falling apart in November 2015 with the arrests of Leonardo Rizzuto and Stefano Sollecito as well as biker and street gang associates.
Police identified the younger Sollecito and Rizzuto as the heads of the Italian Mafia and said an alliance of the Mob, criminal biker gangs and street gangs was set up to maintain control of drug trafficking and money laundering in Montreal.
Pierre de Champlain, an author and ex-RCMP analyst, suggests the next leader will be homegrown.
“I find it difficult to see anyone coming from outside of Montreal coming in here to become leader of the Montreal Mafia,” de Champlain said. “The next leader will be someone from Montreal, who grew up in Montreal.”
NEW YORK — An 82-year-old mob figure who was acquitted in connection with the storied 1978 Lufthansa heist in 2015 was indicted again on Wednesday, this time along with John Gotti’s grandson, accused of conduct as petulant and petty as the $6 million robbery of the terminal at Kennedy Airport was grand: setting fire to the car of a motorist who had cut him off on the streets of Queens.
And if the indignity of being charged in such a scheme was not bad enough, court papers describe its execution as so clumsy that had the elder John Gotti, a crime figure once known as the Teflon Don, not died in prison after a 1992 conviction he might well die now of shame.
To make matters worse, one of two federal indictments unsealed in the case on Wednesday also charged the young mob scion, John J. Gotti, 23, and two other men with a bank robbery that appears on its face to be less than well thought through: The younger Gotti’s girlfriend, according to the court papers, worked as a teller at the bank branch.
The three men, along with the aging, irascible Vincent Asaro, were all charged in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn with arson and arson conspiracy for setting fire to the car after the road rage episode in April 2012. Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, who announced the case along with the FBI, identified Asaro as a powerful member of the Bonanno crime family for more than 30 years who they said has served in various leadership positions.
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HandoutJohn J. Gotti, grandson of notorious mob boss John Gotti.
A separate federal indictment charges three other men, one of whom prosecutors say is an associate of the Bonanno family, in a home invasion robbery and several jewelry store robberies.
Gotti was sentenced earlier this month to eight years in prison on state drug charges for selling Oxycodone in the Queens neighborhoods of Ozone Park and Howard Beach, from what had been the home of his grandfather, where he lives with his parents and grandmother.
Asaro, who has a lengthy criminal history dating to 1957, won a stunning courtroom victory in the Lufthansa case in November 2015, when a jury acquitted him of racketeering and other charges. The case figured prominently in the plot of the 1990 Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas.”
Elizabeth E. Macedonio, one of the lawyers who represented him in that case, cited it when asked about the new charges.
“He’s faced a series of unfounded charges before and was vindicated, and he will do the same this time,” she said.
Gerald Marrone, a lawyer for Gotti, could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.
A detention memo filed in the case against Asaro, Gotti and the two other men said that the older man “became enraged at another motorist who switched lanes in front of Asaro at a traffic light” in Howard Beach.
“Asaro chased the other vehicle for a period of time at a high rate of speed,” the detention memo said. Later, Asaro sought the help of a mob associate in order to get the driver’s address, then directed another to set fire to the motorist’s car, the memo said.
Asaro went along with the associate to identify the car, in the Broad Channel section of Queens, and the associate recruited Gotti and the two other men to set fire to it, the memo said.
Gotti drove his own car, a Jaguar, for the crime, according to the memo, stopping at a gas station with the two other men in the early morning hours of April 4, 2012, to fill a container with gasoline. They drove to Broad Channel and located the car. One of the men doused it with gasoline and the other set it alight, the memo said.
A police officer in an unmarked car witnessed the crime, and when the men saw him they fled in the Jaguar, with the officer in pursuit, the memo said. After a high-speed chase, the officer abandoned his pursuit because the Jaguar was driving so recklessly, it said.
HAMILTON, Ont. — Hamilton police raided a controversial medical marijuana grow-operation after the National Post revealed it was operated by a gangster who had been murdered in Toronto.
Officers with the Vice and Drug unit raided the large building in the city’s east end on April 11, Hamilton police said, five days after the Post published a report on the facility’s connection to organized crime through Antonio Sergi, a mob-linked Toronto man known as “Tony Large” who was shot in his driveway last month.
By the time officers arrived at the marijuana business, however, all plants and people were gone, according to a police statement.
“The Hamilton Police Service received information in regards to a marijuana grow operation at 229 Kenilworth Ave. N. in the City of Hamilton,” says a written statement from police.
“An investigation commenced and a search warrant was sought and granted,” it says. “The operation had been dismantled and removed. There was, however, evidence of a previous marijuana grow operation.”
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HandoutAntonio (Tony Large) Sergi was gunned down in his Toronto driveway on March 31.
The Post was explicitly told by Health Canada earlier this month that the facility was not licensed as a medical marijuana facility, contrary to what the city had been told. On Thursday, Health Canada said it could not comment on the facility’s status for privacy reasons.
Police said the investigation is closed and would not provide any additional information on the raid, nor answer questions on previous police involvement with the building.
The stiff resistance to discuss the raid, which is unusual, suggests it may be related to the homicide investigation in Toronto. Sergi’s murder remains unsolved.
After neighbours complained last year of a strong marijuana odour, city bylaw officials and Hamilton police investigated and reported to council that it was a federally licensed medical marijuana grow operation, said Sam Merulla, city councillor for the area.
The city was surprised since it started without contacting city licensing or zoning officials and officials complained it circumvented all municipal processes, said Merulla. The city and Sergi ended up in court in a fight to shut it down.
The large, dilapidated building, a former bar called Boomers at 229 Kenilworth Ave. N., looked abandoned and derelict even when it was operating. The smell of marijuana wafted from it when a reporter visited on April 5.
On April 6, the Post revealed the victim of a gangland-style slaying in Toronto was heavily involved in the medical marijuana business. Sergi not only led a province-wide bid to unionize medical marijuana growers but also was behind the Kenilworth pot farm.
As part of a legal dispute over his pot operation, Sergi filed a sworn affidavit in court saying he must stay in the building because the federal government wouldn’t let him move: “the plants must be grown either on the property or not at all.” To move would require the federal government’s permission and disrupt the medical needs of people requiring the marijuana, he wrote.
Sergi, the city and the building’s owner came to a settlement shortly before Sergi’s death, with Sergi expected to vacate the building this month.
HAMILTON, Ont. — Angelo Musitano, a scion of an entrenched Mafia family, was gunned down in the driveway of his suburban Hamilton home Tuesday afternoon.
Police cordoned off Chesapeake Drive in a neighbourhood of detached, new-build homes in the community of Waterdown after a shooting around 4 p.m., Tuesday. The homicide unit has been called in and is investigating, said Staff Sgt. Chris Hastings.
Police did not immediately release the name of the victim, but a long-time business associate of the Musitano family confirmed it to the National Post.
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PostmediaAngelo Musitano's namesake, his great-uncle, known as “The Beast of Delianova”.
He was married with three young children. He was 39 years old.
“This is an obvious tragedy for the family,” said the associate who did not wish to be named. “Who? Why? We don’t know yet.”
On Wednesday, police confirmed Musitano was the victim, saying he had been shot numerous times while in his pick up truck in the driveway of his home. He died from his injuries in Hamilton General Hospital.
“Homicide detectives believe this was a targeted attack and there is no immediate threat to the general public,” said Det.-Sgt. Peter Thom. He described the suspected gunman as a stocky man wearing a dark toque, black jacket, grey pants and dark shoes. A dark coloured, four-door sedan was seen leaving the scene.
The Musitano name is one of the best known in the colourful history of Hamilton’s vibrant underworld.
A new branch of the long-time Mafia crime family took root in Canada in 1937 when Musitano’s namesake great-uncle fled Delianova, Italy, a village in Calabria, the toe of the boot-shaped map of Italy.
The elder Angelo Musitano garnered the sobriquet “The Beast of Delianova” by dragging his sister, whom he accused of dishonouring the family, through the town’s streets to her lover’s home, where he killed her on his front steps with a dagger.
That great-uncle settled with family in Hamilton, where he inculcated two nephews into the outlaw tradition, including Musitano’s father, Dominic, who built a crime family that vied for power in Ontario’s active criminal milieu.
Pat Musitano, Dominic’s eldest son, was seen as heir to his father’s mob boss mantle after his father’s sudden death from heart failure in 1995.
Musitano, however, also grew up studying the family trade.
In school, his last name was notorious, and he sometimes taunted teachers with it. He drove a nice car and played the stereo loud in the school parking lot, drawing admiration and ire in equal proportion.
“He was a happy kid who liked to joke. He had an easy laugh. His dad was a lot like that. His dad also was a guy with a good sense of humour,” said a long-time family friend.
Given his upbringing, though, Musitano’s jokes could be deeply dark.
Once when he was a youngster, after a family pet died, he was going with his father to dispose of the pet’s body. With a wry look in his eye, Musitano quipped: “I’m going for my first ride.”
He knew, and those around him knew, that “going for a ride” was a mob euphemism for bumping someone off. The joke displayed his keen understanding of his family lineage.
Of all the boys in that family, Angelo was probably the one who was the most charming
He could also fight. Despite his family genes pulling him towards the rounder side, he was tough and often underestimated.
Once, Musitano and his father took on a group of three or four young men who didn’t realize who they were and tried to mess with them. His father grabbed one by the throat and lifted him off the ground onto the roof of a car. The son dished it just as good.
They were both proud of that scrap.
“Of all the boys in that family, Angelo was probably the one who was the most charming, partly because of his smile.
“He had a mix of charm and cruelty,” said an old friend.
Police investigated many arsons and bombings linked to the Musitano family over the decades.
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PostmediaAngelo's brother Pat Musitano, on the right, attends a funeral.
In 1998, police detectives arrested Musitano and his brother Pat, charging them with ordering the high-profile murder of John “Johnny Pops” Papalia, the top-ranked Mafia boss in the province who was known as the Enforcer for his fearsome power and demeanor.
In 2000, the Musitano brothers were sentenced to 10 years in prison under a plea deal that saw them plead guilty, instead, to conspiring to murder Papalia’s right-hand man, Carmen Barillaro of Niagara Falls, who was shot by the same hit man. The charges in Papalia’s death were dropped under the deal.
Musitano was released from prison in 2007.
His freedom caused such concern that Hamilton’s police chief publicly promised he would be closely monitored. True to his word, police re-arrested Musitano five months later for meeting with someone he was forbidden to contact.
At a parole hearing, police said phone numbers on Musitano’s cellphone, the amount of high-denomination cash he was carrying when re-arrested, and informants who said he was into extortion suggested he had reactivated a life in crime.
Musitano offered innocent explanations for it all.
“You deny any criminal activity while on release and no persuasive information has been provided to corroborate the informants’ claims in this regard,” the parole board said.
He was released again on parole.
He has since been off the radar, at least publicly.
This month, however, marks the 20th anniversary of Papalia’s murder.
HAMILTON, Ont. — The day after startling news of the targeted murder of Angelo Musitano, the son of a notorious Mafia boss and a well-known gangster in his own right, a small, close-knit group of his friends gathered behind closed doors, and there, where no prying ears could hear, they spoke — they prayed for Musitano, for his family and then for the gunman who shot him dead in front of his house.
This is a group that represents a different side of Musitano, a man who had turned his back on a long life of crime, members of the Christian men’s Bible study group say.
Musitano had embraced Jesus Christ and was going headlong down the path of relentless Christianity and attended their Bible study group for about four years, they said.
The stark irony for them is that the day Musitano was killed was the same day his first-person story of his transformation appeared in a published religious book. The authors who collected the stories from 13 men and women received their copies that same day, but never had a chance to deliver a copy to Musitano.
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PostmediaAngelo Musitano's namesake, his great-uncle, known as “The Beast of Delianova”.
“There are some who will know me by my name alone and will recall my past history. There are those who will sit in judgment of me because of my past but these are the people who do not really know me,” the chapter on Musitano’s testimony begins.
“I was born into a family — not just any family but ‘the family’ — in other words a family associated with organized crime.”
The chapter goes on to speak of his upbringing, being “constantly in and out of trouble with the law,” and his conviction for a murder conspiracy in a plea deal, after being charged with ordering hits on two rival Mafia bosses.
Both before prison and in prison, the chapter says, he saw “the worst of the human condition — beatings, stabbings and murder,” but after serving his sentence he tried to “distance myself from my past.”
It was hard for an ex-con, he said. He met the woman he would marry in 2008, and while they were expecting their first child, the book says, “God found me.”
I was born into a family — not just any family but ‘the family’
He saw a Bible on a friend’s table and started reading. He went straight out to buy a copy. He still struggled to make a better life until he realized he had to give up “everything from the past and start over” to move forward, the chapter reads.
“I made amends with God for my mistakes and He blessed me with peace and love,” it says. He realized, it says, “I have now taken a stand to help other young men and women to learn from my mistakes.”
Art Duerksen, a Hamilton missionary who helped gather the stories for the book, entitled Are You Looking For the Truth: I Found Him, said the story is a true reflection of the man he and others in the men’s group knew.
“These are his words. He dictated it. It was a personal interview, right from his mouth. Everyone knew who he was. This is who he is — who he was, as of yesterday.”
Duerksen said he saw evidence of Musitano’s dedication to his new life when he dropped in unannounced and unexpected at Musitano’s restaurant on Hamilton’s Concession Street.
“I walked in the back room and there was Angelo with a couple other guys and they were just talking, and I walked in on him and he smiled and said ‘that’s that guy I told you I met.’ And — this is the truth — his Bible is right there on the table,” Duerksen said.
He was right on track. He was moving forward. And his family accepted that
“Ang showed his faith, relentlessly. He was pretty radical, buddy, I’m telling you.
“He was right on track. He was moving forward. And his family accepted that. I think they all thought he was a little bit out there at first. My family went through the same thing.”
He gave out books on Jesus and rosaries to those he met.
“He handed out rosaries like they were candy,” said Mike King, who was a member of the same small group. “He handed them out to people he met and spoke to, on a regular basis, because he so respected his Catholic roots.
“He loved his rosary,” said King.
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PostmediaAngelo's brother Pat Musitano, on the right, attends a funeral.
“He was trying to keep his nose clean. He was trying to run a legitimate business and provide legitimately for his family. But that isn’t a headline,” said King.
Musitano was attending the Christian men’s group for about four years, they said. When he introduced himself to the group, people immediately recognized his name. He didn’t shy from his past, they said.
The morning after the news of his death, the group met without Musitano. It was emotional, they said.
I would say if it’s a war it’s been fairly quiet
“We all met this morning for about an hour and a half and guys exchanged stories,” said Duerksen. “We all shared stories and we cried a lot. We were praying for whoever did this, whoever they are, because they are lost.
“Ang found his way but this guy is still lost.”
Police are hoping the gunman is, in their own way, found.
Det. Sgt. Peter Thom said the shooter was caught on video surveillance climbing out of a car that was waiting for Musitano to return to his home in a suburban neighbourhood in Hamilton’s Waterdown community, at about 4 p.m. Tuesday. He walked up beside Musitano’s white pickup truck and shot him multiple times at close range.
He then climbed back in the car and fled. Police accept it was a targeted attack.
“I would say if it’s a war it’s been fairly quiet. If this is an organized crime type situation we haven’t had one in Hamilton for a very long time,” said Thom.
Do police fear retribution from Musitano’s family?
“I’m hoping not,” Thom said. “We have been in touch with the family and they haven’t asked for any assistance from police.”
Did police put faith in Musitano being a changed man? Thom didn’t have an answer. “Certainly he has had limited police contact since his release,” he said.
For more than 80 years, police in Canada and Italy tracked members of the Musitano Mafia family. It was considered one of three mob clans in Hamilton, under Musitano’s father, Dominic, who died of natural causes in 1995.
A veteran police officer who personally investigated and monitored the Musitano bothers for several years listened to the stories of Musitano’s transformation with interest.
“I cannot substantiate the claims,” he said. “Do I think he would have gotten out of it completely? My heart says not a chance. Ang can pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. But you know, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, unless it’s proven otherwise.
HAMILTON, Ont. — The day after Angelo Musitano was murdered in his driveway, his older brother — believed to be the boss of a Mafia clan that bears the family name — exchanged his flashy Ferrari sports car for something less likely to draw attention.
Further, about two months before Tuesday’s targeted shooting, the elder brother, Pasquale “Pat” Musitano, inquired about having his cars bulletproofed, sources in the auto industry tell the National Post.
Taken together, the two alleged incidents suggest not only that the Musitano family was bracing for violence prior to the shooting, but remain concerned the violence is not over.
The revelation comes as Angelo Musitano had a discreet and private funeral service, Friday, at St. Mary’s Church, his family’s longtime parish, close to the house he grew up in.
The Mass of Christian burial was offered to Angelo Musitano on what would have been his fifth wedding anniversary, in the same church in which he was married.
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PostmediaAngelo Musitano in a 2010 photo. Musitano, the scion of a prominent Mafia family, was shot dead Tuesday outside his Hamilton home.
“It was very emotional, especially for his wife” said Monsignor Edward Sheridan, who presided over the service. “Five years ago she came down the aisle in the same church for her wedding, full of joy and happiness and today, five years later, she was coming down the same aisle behind the casket of her husband.”
Det. Sgt. Peter Thom of Hamilton police, who is lead investigator of the murder, declined to comment on the car information.
Angelo Musitano, 39, was shot repeatedly at close range on Tuesday while inside his white pick-up truck after arriving at his suburban home in Hamilton’s Waterdown community.
The attack was “a very specific, calculated, close-up shooting,” said Thom earlier this week; when he was asked if Pat Musitano was in danger, Thom said: “We have been in touch with the family and they haven’t asked for any assistance from police.”
The family is used to dealing with things on their own, in their own way. It has a colourful history as a well-connected, active and influential Mafia family stretching back more than 80 years.
They always had stuff like that — muscle cars that were ridiculously fast — as toys but were generally kept hidden away
On Wednesday, as news of the murder was making headlines, Pat Musitano returned his grey Ferrari California hard-top convertible with orange and beige interior to a leasing agent. He allegedly said his reason for returning it early was he was trying to stay low key, according to a source with knowledge of the transaction.
The Ferrari California, made by the famed Italian manufacturer Ferrari, is a grand touring sports car.
The car’s return could not be independently verified.
In March or April, Pat Musitano made inquiries about the cost and ability to add bulletproofing protection to some of the cars he uses day-to-day, according to a source in the industry.
He was interested in adding bulletproof shielding in the doors, replacing the windows with resistant glass, and having steel reinforcements in the tires that allow cars to drive even if the rubber tires are blown or shot out.
This too could not be independently verified. The family could not be reached for comment.
In keeping with his family’s tradition, Pat Musitano’s sports car was an occasional show vehicle, mainly used on weekends or for business meetings where he had a certain image of financial success to maintain, according to a longtime family friend.
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PostmediaAngelo's brother Pat Musitano, on the right, attends a funeral.
Pat Musitano used more modest vehicles in his daily routine, in keeping with the humble, working-class image the family has always maintained.
It was a lesson the Musitanos’ father, Dominic, who forged a prominent place for the clan in Ontario’s underworld, taught his sons, leading by example, the family friend said.
Dominic Musitano would often say — usually with a dismissive shrug — that he’s only a modest businessman who runs a scrapyard and owns some property, whenever he was asked what he did for a living. But he, too, had hidden indulgences, including spontaneously buying powerful but not flashy cars for his sons, including for Angelo.
“They always had stuff like that — muscle cars that were ridiculously fast — as toys but were generally kept hidden away,” the friend said.
Dominic Musitano remained an old-school, traditional mafioso, eschewing the outward glitz and flash of many modern gangsters. It is the way of the old mafiosi in Calabria, the region in southern Italy where the ’Ndrangheta (the proper name of the Calabrian Mafia) was first formed.
Pat and Angelo Musitano, and a third brother, were extraordinarily close, which often occurs in mob clans, which tend towards the insular when it comes to trust and bonding.
Mourners at the funeral Friday said it was emotional.
The hour long service focused on God’s mercy and compassion. It also spoke of Angelo Musitano’s transformation, turning from a gangster life to a Christian life.
“He was very sincere and open hearted about that,” said Sheridan.
After Angelo Musitano’s murder, several friends from his Christian men’s group came forward to say he had broken from his criminal past, reconfirmed his life to Jesus Christ and committed himself to living to please God.
Members of the non-denominational Christian men’s group said he attended their weekly Bible study group for about four years.
The irony for them is that the day he was killed was the same day his first-person testimony of his transformation appeared in a published religious book. The authors who collected the stories from 13 men and women received their copies that same day, but never had a chance to deliver a copy to him before his death.
Excerpts from his published testimony were read at his funeral service.
After the church service and communion, his casket was carried past the tombstone of his father at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, in neighbouring Burlington, for entombment nearby, with his three young sons watching on.
The gunman who shot and killed well-known Hamilton, Ont., mobster Angelo Musitano on Tuesday ditched the Ford Fusion he drove for the hit just 450 metres away, likely switching into another vehicle for his get-away, police say.
Police believe Musitano, 39, may have been stalked for a week before the shooting.
Investigators released a video clip of what they say is the car used in the daylight shooting. Musitano was shot repeatedly at close range while inside his pickup truck about 4 p.m., shortly after pulling into the driveway of his home in the suburban community of Waterdown.
On Sunday, Hamilton police found the gunman’s car abandoned near the intersection of Fenton Dr. and Braeheid Ave., which is one block — less than a minute’s drive — from Musitano’s house at 14 Chesapeake Dr., police said.
The abandoned car is a four-door 2006 Ford Fusion, burgundy with rusty wheel-rims.
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Hamilton Police ServiceThe suspected gunman in the slaying of Hamilton mobster Angelo Musitano drove this 2006 burgundy Ford Fusion but abandoned it a block away.
Investigators did not say what was the status or condition of the vehicle. Usually cars used in this way are stolen for use in the job. They are often burned afterwards, but it is unlikely this car was set ablaze since it took five days for police to find it.
Police are asking for anyone who saw the burgundy Ford Fusion on the day of the shooting or in the week prior to contact investigators.
Further, police wish to connect the gunman to the car used to flee the area and ask anyone who may have witnessed a second vehicle in the area or any suspicious circumstances to contact them.
The suspect is described as a white male, stocky or athletic build, wearing a black toque, black jacket, grey pants and black shoes.
Musitano was given a discreet funeral service Friday at St. Mary’s Church, his family’s longtime parish, close to the house he grew up in. His funeral came on what would have been his fifth wedding anniversary, in the same church in which he was married.
“It was very emotional, especially for his wife” said Monsignor Edward Sheridan, who presided over the service, told the National Post last week. “Five years ago she came down the aisle in the same church for her wedding, full of joy and happiness and today, five years later, she was coming down the same aisle behind the casket of her husband.”
He is the middle son of three born to Mafia boss Dominic Musitano, who forged the family, originally from Calabria, Italy, into one of three Mafia clans that ran Hamilton’s underworld for decades. Dominic Musitano died of natural causes in 1995.
Musitano’s older brother, Pasquale “Pat” Musitano, is believed to have taken leadership of the family after Dominic’s death.
The family appeared to have feared violence prior to the shooting and be concerned it is not over.
Pat Musitano returned his grey Ferrari California hard-top convertible with orange and beige interior to a leasing agent the day after the shooting, saying he was trying to stay low key, according to a source with knowledge of the transaction.
The car’s return could not be independently verified.
And according to a source in the industry, two months prior Pat Musitano explored the cost and viability of bulletproofing some of the cars he uses day-to-day.
After Angelo Musitano’s murder, several friends from his Christian men’s group came forward to say he had broken from his criminal past, reconfirmed his life to Jesus Christ and committed himself to living to please God.
Members of the non-denominational Christian men’s group said he attended their weekly Bible study group for about four years.
Excerpts from his testimony of his transformation, published in a collection of Christian stories the day he was murdered, were read at his funeral service.
Hamilton police believe two people were involved in the daylight murder of mobster Angelo Musitano, although only one was captured on surveillance video.
Based on witness information and images captured on the numerous security systems peppered about the neighbourhood, police say the gunman got out of the driver’s door of the Ford Fusion before opening fire at close range on Musitano, 39, as he arrived home in his pickup truck. The gunman then returned to the driver’s seat of the Ford.
But that car was found Sunday just 450 metres away — less than a minute’s drive — from Musitano’s house on Chesapeake Dr.
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Hamilton Police ServiceThe suspected gunman in the slaying of Hamilton mobster Angelo Musitano drove this 2006 burgundy Ford Fusion but abandoned it a block away.
Det.-Sgt. Peter Thom, the lead homicide investigator on the case, told the National Post the gunman likely switched into a different car to make his escape, one that was likely driven by an accomplice.
“It appears well planned, and a second vehicle parked nearby with a driver would make sense,” said Thom. “You don’t want to be involved in something like this and get back to the car and find that the car has been towed or is gone. It would make sense there is a second person involved.”
The investigation of Tuesday’s murder in a suburban residential enclave of well-appointed detached homes became immediately more complicated when officers learned the identity of the victim, the middle son of a prominent Ontario Mafia boss who forged an active and aggressive crime family that bears his last name.
The car that was recovered was likely stolen, although police have not fully established that, Thom said. It was registered to a company and investigators are narrowing down who was supposed to be in control of the vehicle at the time.
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PostmediaAngelo Musitano in a 2010 photo. Musitano, the scion of a prominent Mafia family, was shot dead Tuesday outside his Hamilton home.
The car was parked normally on the residential street and was not set ablaze in a bid to destroy evidence, as is often done in mob hits.
The car simply sat at the side of the road for five days until a resident called police about a suspicious or abandoned car, he said.
Police want the public’s help to make that link, either by witnesses who unknowingly saw the fast car switch or a second suspicious vehicle or homeowners with surveillance systems that may have caught something on camera.
Thom said there is a different layer of complication to an investigation when a victim or crime is linked to organized crime.
“Is it something from the past? Is it something current? In an investigation like this there will be more theories than in your normal homicide investigation, because of the victim’s background,” he said.
“We’ll follow the evidence but look at the whole picture.”
In an investigation like this there will be more theories than in your normal homicide investigation, because of the victim’s background
In Mafia murder investigations, there is often tension between the homicide investigators tasked with solving a crime and proving it in court, and intelligence officers who have been watching and gathering information on the mobsters for decades.
Homicide officers chase physical evidence and are sometimes criticized for ignoring patterns and information about grudges and rivalries in the underworld, or for downplaying the ability of crime groups to farm out hits to otherwise non-involved people; intelligence officers, on the other hand, are sometimes lampooned for trying to read tea leaves when they should be looking at blood stains, or are asked why they’re obsessed with something that happened 20 years ago when they should focus on what happened 20 minutes ago.
Past mob murder investigations show the best information often comes when both sides of the equation are carefully weighed.
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Pete Fisher, Toronto SunPasquale Musitano is led into court.
In this case, the victim is the middle son of three born to Mafia boss Dominic Musitano, who forged the family — originally from Calabria, Italy — into one of three Mafia clans that ran Hamilton’s underworld for decades.
Dominic Musitano died of natural causes in 1995, leaving his eldest son, the victim’s brother, Pasquale “Pat” Musitano, to lead the family.
Twenty years ago this month, John “Johnny Pops” Papalia, who was a veteran Mafia boss and leading mob figure in Ontario, was shot dead in the parking lot of his vending machine business in central Hamilton.
Both Pat and Angelo Musitano were charged in the murder after the hit man, Ken Murdock, said he was ordered by the Musitanos to kill Papalia and his right-hand man, Niagara crime lord Carmen Barillaro. The brothers struck a plea deal that saw them plead guilty in Barillaro’s killing in return for charges in Papalia’s being dropped.
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Postmedia archive Johnny 'Pops' Papalia, seen here in a 1975 file photo
Over many decades, the Musitano crime family has been particularly active in gambling and extortion and involved in underworld intrigue as the Rizzuto Mafia family of Montreal made a move to control Ontario after Papalia’s death.
Motive for Mafia murders, however, are not easily pinned down because mobsters deal almost every day with men who can or have killed, and any slight could trigger an attack. While a 20-year revenge plot is intriguing, Musitano’s murder could just as easily be over an old loan to an associate or soured business deal.
For his part, Thom seems to understand the place of this victim and this particular family.
He seems well aware of the intricacies of Hamilton’s colourful, violent and byzantine underworld.
“We’re advocating for the victim here, which is Ang, who can’t advocate for himself now. And we’re working for the public and public safety and for Ang’s family, who all want to see this solved,” Thom said.
Musitano was given a discreet funeral service Friday at St. Mary’s Church, his family’s longtime parish, close to the house he grew up in. His funeral came on what would have been his fifth wedding anniversary, in the same church in which he was married.
Thom would not comment on whether police were monitoring the funeral service or burial, where Musitano’s casket was carried past the tombstone of his father at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, in neighbouring Burlington, for entombment with his three young sons watching on.
Friends of Musitano’s said he had turned his life around in the past four years, found God and joined their weekly men’s Christian Bible study group.
The suspected gunman is described as a white male with a stocky or athletic build, wearing a black toque, black jacket, grey pants and black shoes. He drove a burgundy, four-door, 2006 Ford Fusion.
Lawyers and doctors of Michael G. DeGroote, one of Canada’s wealthiest businessmen and most generous philanthropists, say he is mentally unfit and no longer capable of representing himself in court.
The onset of dementia, intense chronic pain and long-term ailments chronicled in medical documents present a tragic decline for the strong-willed man who built a billion-dollar empire from nothing, was awarded the Order of Canada and has university faculties and school buildings named after him.
Once a lion of industry — in trucking, waste management and school buses — he has lost as much as $200 million in poor business deals, two-bit scams and frauds since 2007, court documents claim.
The former jetsetter lifestyle of the 83-year-old entrepreneur has shrunk to almost nothing through the ravages of dementia and chronic pain, according to medical records filed in court as part of a legal fight over a $112-million casino operation that devolved into accusations of Mafia infiltration, death threats and fraud.
Despite consultations and procedures by doctors around the world, DeGroote remains in intense pain, court heard.
He has tried clinical trials in the United States, acupuncture in China, stem cell treatment in Russia, medical marijuana, other procedures in Belgium and the Caribbean, and repeated visits with doctors at McMaster University Medical Centre, the Hamilton, Ont., hospital which hosts the medical school bearing his name. Degroote’s $105-million donation in 2003 was the largest cash gift in Canadian history at the time.
None of his treatments have provided lasting relief.
He was described as waking at 7 a.m. most days and sitting or lying down for much of the day smoking and watching Fox News when not attending therapy or medical appointments. He usually eats in the same restaurant because they let him smoke there.
He gave up his yacht because the vibrations aboard it exacerbated his pain, and he dislikes flying on his private jet for the same reason. His relationship with a “lady friend,” as he described her, was a rare source of joy, the filings say.
The once astute businessman has fallen prey to telephone, postal and email scams, according to interviews with many of the people closest to DeGroote, including two of his four children, and noted in court filings.
In one instance, he received a phone call directing him to pay upfront money to collect a big payout at a drug store. Even though DeGroote wasn’t supposed to drive, his Bentley was found wedged in a planter at a Florida mall after he apparently crashed trying to get to the drug store, according to filings made on his behalf.
His nurses said they limit his ability to make spontaneous purchases while watching late-night TV.
He put his plumber in charge of a large real estate company that failed. Hucksters in Panama talked him into making a $1-million donation to an orphanage that appears to be a scam.
Lawyers representing DeGroote in the lengthy and difficult Caribbean casino litigation recently moved to appoint a litigation guardian to act on DeGroote’s behalf because of his decline.
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Agenda NacionalAntonio Carbone, an Ontario businessman, was shown in handcuffs and under arrest and being led through a courthouse in the Dominican Republic after his arrest there in a bizarre dispute over a casino investment by Canadian billionaire Michael DeGroote.
Lawyers for one of the defendant groups sought to cross-examine the proposed guardian and the matter has been adjourned.
Sam Rogers, one of DeGroote’s lawyers at McCarthy Tétrault, declined to comment on the guardianship motion.
The legal dispute at issue started in 2012 when DeGroote filed a lawsuit claiming he is the victim of an almost $112-million fraud. He claims he lent the money to a company controlled by three Toronto-area men — two brothers, Antonio and Francesco Carbone, and Andrew Pajak — to fund gambling enterprises in the Caribbean.
The partnership went horribly awry.
DeGroote seeks $200-million in damages for fraud and breach of trust. The affair came under public scrutiny when the National Post and other media published accounts of the deal that had degenerated into threats, violence, arrests and allegations of Mafia interference.
Security video from inside Dream Casino, the Dominican Republic casino that the business partners operated, show Vito Rizzuto, the Godfather of the Mafia in Montreal, being given a tour of the gaming floor in 2013 by Alex Visser, who DeGroote had previously paid.
Mr. DeGroote has done wonderful things in his life, I don’t think anyone disputes that
Rizzuto died of cancer shortly after. (A lawyer for DeGroote previously told the Post that DeGroote had no association with Rizzuto.)
In 2015, Antonio Carbone, of Woodridge, Ont., one of the defendants in DeGroote’s lawsuits, was arrested in the DR and charged after a firebomb destroyed the car of a lawyer working as an administrator for the troubled casino firm.
Carbone has been held in pretrial detention since.
Last summer, DeGroote’s lawyers retained Dr. Hy Bloom, a forensic psychiatrist, to conduct a capacity assessment. Bloom asked Dr. Angela Carter, a neuropsychologist, to also assess DeGroote.
Carter’s assessment in January concluded that DeGroote’s “cognitive impairments are significant,” and “impinge on his ability to engage in tasks requiring any measure of cognitive focus.”
Bloom’s assessment in March noted DeGroote’s medical history adds to his problems, which include persistent pain as a result of a stroke in 2001; high-dose pain medications; multiple operations, including for metastatic melanoma (skin cancer that has spread to other parts of his body) and deep brain stimulation.
DeGroote could not recall key dates in his life and could not name the U.S. president; he knew the name of the Prime Minister but could not recall his predecessor. DeGroote realizes his lapses and said it “drives him crazy,” the report says.
In the motion to appoint a litigation guardian, DeGroote’s lawyers claim: “Mr. DeGroote is mentally incapable of instructing counsel as a result of his medical condition.”
His lawyers asked that James Alexander Watt, DeGroote’s chief of staff, be appointed litigation guardian.
Watt is a Canadian citizen who lives in Bermuda. A chartered financial analyst, he started working with DeGroote in 1991 and since 2007 has been DeGroote’s most senior advisor, Watt said in an affidavit filed in court.
The lawyer for the Carbone brothers did not return phone messages for comment. Morris Cooper, representing various Dream casino corporations, said he did not oppose the motion and had nothing more to add.
Ronald Flom, a lawyer representing Pajak, said he did not oppose the motion once he was assured DeGroote’s lawyers would not use the guardianship as a reason to not make the businessman available as a witness at future proceedings.
“Mr. DeGroote has done wonderful things in his life, I don’t think anyone disputes that, and it is unfortunate he is not well,” said Flom.
A Mafia fugitive from Italy — named as the axis of a powerful mob clan in Canada, Italy and the Netherlands — was arrested Friday as he tried to board an airplane in Brazil.
Vincenzo Macri, 53, is wanted in Italy for drug trafficking and other charges after he escaped arrest in 2015 during a large police probe targeting the underworld “elite” — some of the world’s strongest and wealthiest Mafia clans, authorities said.
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HandoutVincenzo Macri
That large drugs, guns and money probe, called Operation Acero-Krupy, brought the arrest of more than 50 alleged mafiosi in Italy and warrants against a dozen men living in Canada.
Macri, however, escaped the dragnet. He was living in Holland at the time and running a flower business.
Polícia Federal in Brazil said Macri was arrested June 9 as he attempted to board a plane at Guarulhos International Airport, the main international airport serving São Paulo.
“The prisoner used a false Venezuelan identity and presented himself as Angelo Di Giacomo,” Brazilian police said in a statement.
He was destined for Venzuela, where he is believed to have been living quietly since the 2015 raids.
Brazilian police said Macri is accused of organizing the internal affairs of the Mafia organization, gathering and transmitting important information between Italy, Canada and Holland.
The organization is sometimes called The Siderno Group because the constellation of allied mob clans have roots to the town and area around Siderno, on the eastern coast of southern Italy in Calabria, at the toe of the boot-shaped map of Italy.
The accused man’s father was legendary Mafia boss Antonio Macri, who was killed in an ambush in 1975. The elder Macri was called “the Boss of Two Worlds” because he forged links between his homeland and North America.
The Macri clan had a tremendous impact on the history of Canada’s underworld.
Antonio Macri’s friend, Michele “Mike” Racco, came to Canada from Siderno in 1952 and ran a bakery in Toronto but also the Canadian arm of Macri’s organization. With Macri’s backing Racco became a leading underworld figure. Over time, the Canadian connection became crucial to the ‘Ndrangheta’s rise as leading drug traffickers, Italian authorities said.
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HandoutMike Racco
(The ’Ndrangheta is the proper name of the Mafia that formed in Italy’s region of Calabria.)
The “families present in Canada began their climb to the top of the criminal world, turning themselves very slowly into the point group for those in Calabria interested in selling drugs,” says a 2010 indictment in Italy against international mobsters.
In 2015, dozens of accused mobsters were arrested in Europe in Operation Acero-Krupy — the very name demonstrating the Canadian connection: acero is Italian for “maple,” while Krupy is a purposeful misspelling of the name of a family under investigation.
The operation revealed further evidence of the close, ongoing ties between the current members of the Siderno Group in Italy and Canada.
Prosecutors claim hidden microphones captured conversations between Vincenzo Macri and his brother-in-law, Vincenzo Crupi, who had recently returned to Italy from Canada.
“Crupi, coming from Canada, provided a detailed report to Vincenzo Macri about the outcome of his meetings in Canada with members at the top of the ’Ndrangheta operating in that territory,” prosecutors wrote, summarizing their allegations, translated from Italian by the National Post.
The conversations, authorities say, “seriously highlight the danger of an escalation of an armed conflict within the coterie of ’Ndrangheta clans, operating for a long time in Canadian territory.
After hearing the wiretaps, authorities in Italy warned Canadian police that mobsters here seemed on the brink of war.
Inter-clan friction in Canada sharply increased after the 2014 murder of Carmine Verduci, the prosecutors say. Verduci, 56, was an important mobster in the Toronto area, described as a transatlantic go-between for gangsters in Italy and Canada, until he was shot dead outside Regina Sports Café in Woodbridge in April 2014.
Prosecutors of the Italian case said Crupi spoke directly about Verduci’s still-unsolved murder; Crupi called it an “assassination,” and alleged it was “planned and determined” by two brothers from Vaughan, Ont., who are considered fugitives in Italy for Mafia association, documents filed in court in Italy say.
Operation Acero-Krupy began when police in Italy eavesdropped on conversations between two other men who also have close ties to Canada.
Giuseppe Coluccio and his younger brother, Antonio Coluccio, are both former residents of Ontario. Giuseppe Coluccio was deported in 2008 and the younger left under pressure from immigration authorities in 2010, leaving his wife and children here.
The ’Ndrangheta is built on a confederacy of like-minded clans, each relying on family bonds. It is similar, but separate from the better-known Mafia of Sicily, called Cosa Nostra. Police around the world say the ’Ndrangheta has become the most dangerous and powerful Italian crime group.
A national risk assessment by the RCMP recently identified the ’Ndrangheta in Canada as a priority threat.
As reported by the Post in 2010, Italian authorities said at least seven primary ’Ndrangheta clans operated in the Toronto area and the organization had climbed “to the top of the criminal world,” by establishing a “continuous flow of cocaine.”
In 2010, prosecutors said there was “an unbreakable umbilical cord” between the ’Ndrangheta in Canada and in Italy.
Macri remains in custody in Brazil pending extradition to Italy.
The guest list of gangland figures attending Hamilton mobster Angelo Musitano’s 2012 wedding casts doubt on a prevailing theory of why he was killed and why his brother’s house was sprayed with bullets.
Invited to Musitano’s wedding — held five years to the day before his funeral — were criminals widely thought to be his enemies and few popularly seen as his allies.
Musitano was shot in his pickup truck in the driveway of his house in Hamilton’s suburb of Waterdown on May 2. On June 27, the Hamilton home of his older brother, Pasquale “Pat” Musitano, was repeated shot at with bullets, piercing windows but not injuring anyone. Pat Musitano is the reputed head of the Musitano crime family, a position inherited after the death of his father.
Both attacks remain unsolved.
An appealing theory quickly emerged based on an important distinction in traditional Italian Mafia groups between mobsters with roots in the Calabria region and those with roots in Sicily.
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Pat Musitano
The two areas, though geographically close, spawned their own organized crime structure: the Sicilian crime families of Cosa Nostra and the Calabrian crime families of the ’Ndrangheta. Both organizations spread to Canada and other countries to become global crime superpowers. Members have variously cooperated and competed but typically remain distrustful, even disdainful, of the other.
The Sicilian/Calabrian distinction has been one of the major drivers of Canada’s mob history.
In the 1990s when Vito Rizzuto, the Sicilian Mafia boss from Montreal, expanded into Ontario, a stronghold for Calabrian mob clans, it was surprising to hear an important ally was the Musitano crime family, originally from Calabria but based in Hamilton.
Rizzuto’s expansion was boosted by the 1997 murder of veteran Ontario Mafia boss John Papalia, of Hamilton, known as “Johnny Pops” or “The Enforcer.” The hitman who shot Papalia testified he did it at the request of the Musitano family.
The Rizzuto family’s power did not hold. Vito Rizzuto was imprisoned in the United States in 2006 and his youngest son, father, and brother-in-law were killed. Rizzuto himself died of natural causes in 2013, and his clan’s power waned.
The attacks on the Musitanos brought that history to the forefront.
Angelo Musitano’s slaying happened 20 years to the month after Papalia was killed. The timing sparked a theory that, with the protection from Rizzuto’s Sicilian organization evaporating, Calabrian traditionalists in Ontario are taking cold revenge. And it could be that.
However, the gangland guests seen enjoying the hospitality at Musitano’s wedding were thick with Calabrian traditionalists and allies of the Papalia organization.
According to a government intelligence report compiling police information on Mafia activity in the Toronto area, written in 2014 and obtained by the National Post, police were secretly watching Musitano’s Hamilton wedding.
Among the family, friends, neighbours and business associates of the close-knit family were several Mafia figures, the report says — most of them with ties to the ’Ndrangheta clans of Toronto and Calabrian mobsters.
• Cosimo Commisso, a long-alleged senior Mafia boss and influential figure within the ’Ndrangheta in Toronto. Commisso has a serious but dated criminal record, including conspiring to murder two Sicilian mobsters in Toronto;
• Domenic Violi, whose father was Paolo Violi, who was the powerful Calabrian boss of Montreal’s Mafia until he was murdered in 1978 by members of the Rizzuto crime family who then seized control of Montreal’s underworld;
• Domenico Figliomeni, son-in-law of Vincenzo “Jimmy” DeMaria, an powerful criminal from Calabria frequently named as one of Toronto’s most influential ’Ndrangheta bosses. The report says Figliomeni often acts as an “intermediary” for DeMaria, attending meetings on his behalf because parole conditions preclude DeMaria from associating with people involved in crime. (DeMaria is on lifetime parole for a 1981 murder over an unpaid debt.)
• Natale Luppino, a son of Giacomo Luppino, the grand old Mafia don from Calabria who settled in Hamilton and ran a powerful crime family. Papalia was closely aligned with the Luppinos;
• Two other members of the Violi and Luppino families.
Some of these men, or other members of organizations they have been linked with, are among those seen as most infringed or aggrieved by the Rizzutos’ incursion into Ontario or the attack on Papalia and the old underworld order.
Not on the partial wedding guest list are prominent mobsters aligned with the Sicilian faction or the Rizzutos — with one exception.
Seen by police at the wedding, the report says, was Giuseppe “Big Joe” Cuntrera, named as a leading member of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, a significant Sicilian Mafia group allied with the Rizzutos. Cuntrera, based in Toronto, has had close business ties with senior Calabrian gangsters, authorities say.
Some of those at the wedding have had troubles of their own that are eerily similar to the Musitanos’ problems.
A Toronto-area bakery that Cuntrera frequently hung out in was recently firebombed and his house, like Pat Musitano’s, was recently peppered with bullets, according to a source.
Another wedding attendee was Antonio Sergi, a Toronto gangster known as “Tony Large.” Sergi was a big player in the medical marijuana business, including a controversial urban pot farm in Hamilton, until April when he, like Angelo Musitano, was shot dead in his driveway.
In the underworld, analyzing the meaning behind social patterns is fraught with difficulty, however. Underworld feuds and relationships are notoriously complicated.
“These guys will be doing business with someone this week and then kill them the next,” said a source with close knowledge of the underworld. “It’s crazy.”
MONTREAL — The last 11 people accused in a massive Quebec Mob bust dubbed Project Clemenza saw the charges against them stayed Monday at the request of the prosecution.
A spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada said a stay of proceedings was a discretionary decision by the Crown and was the only possible move.
“The request for disclosure from the defence raised very complex issues and, despite all the efforts, the prosecution was not in a position to meet its disclosure obligations,” the agency said in an email.
The accused were among those charged in a major police operation targeting organized crime between 2014 and 2016 that led to dozens of arrests.
Prosecutor Andre Albert Morin told reporters the Crown asked for the stay after speaking to investigators in the RCMP-led case and concluding it wouldn’t be able to provide answers to pointed technical questions from the defence.
At the time of the first wave of arrests, the RCMP proudly boasted about an investigative tactic that saw more than one million private PIN to PIN BlackBerry messages intercepted between 2010 and 2012 and analyzed.
Morin said the accused are now free without any further court-ordered conditions.
Technically, the prosecution has 12 months to refile charges according to the Criminal Code, but Morin wouldn’t say what he planned to do.
In March, the federal Crown used its discretion in a similar fashion to have charges stayed against 36 people arrested in Clemenza.
In that instance, a prosecutor told reporters that numerous factors played a part in the decision, including a recent Supreme Court ruling that set strict time limits for cases to get to trial.
But Montreal La Presse reported the Crown’s decision was based on the quality of the evidence and the techniques used to gather it.
One criminal attorney not connected to the current case says it could cause problems down the road.
“If they want to use this investigative technique in the future to gather evidence to charge someone, the accused will still be allowed to obtain all the evidence against them,” said Walid Hijazi, a defence lawyer.
“So it’s a delicate problem that the authorities will have to solve.”
Clemenza was the biggest anti-Mafia police sweep by federal authorities since its takedown of the Rizzuto crime family during Operation Colisee in 2006.
The suspects in question faced an array of charges, including trafficking, importation and production of drugs, and others related to weapons, arson and kidnapping.
The takedown went smoothly. Dash cam footage from the Italian Special Operation Squad shows police vehicles cutting off the gray car on a thin ribbon of country road. The car’s one-eyed driver puts his head out the open window and ducks back inside when he sees men with pistols and semiautomatic guns bolting forward. Then Massimo Carminati – an underworld boss so powerful he called himself the “Last King of Rome,” a career-criminal who had already lost one eye in a gun battle with police – puts up his hands and surrenders.
The December 2014 arrest was the first step in a massive sting aimed at public corruption in Rome’s municipal machinery. Eventually, 46 criminals, business people and politicians were charged in a scheme to reroute public funds away from civic projects into private pockets, including housing developments meant for recent immigrants fleeing the Middle East.
Extortion, fraud, theft and money-laundering were all among charges leveled against the defendants, who were dubbed the “Mafia Capitale” in the press.
And this week, after a 20-month trial, guilty verdicts were handed to the majority of the individuals involved, Italy’s The Local reports, including the bossman, Carminati.
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This file photo taken on November 5, 2015 shows prosecutor Giuseppe Cascini (standing C-L) speaking at Rome’s tribunal, on the opening day of the Mafia Capitale trial.
But the trial was still somewhat of a win for defendants. While Judge Rosanna Ianniello said the accused were guilty of corruption, she did not buy the state’s case that the men were a “mafia association.”
The distinction is key in Italy, where the word “mafia” not only carries heavy cultural baggage but can supersize a punitive outcome. “The sentence is stiff, but the whole trial revolved around the question, ‘was it mafia or not?'” Carminati’s lawyer, Ippolita Naso, told reporters. “Mafia Capitale does not exist.”
Mafia don or not, Carminati had a devastating impact on the municipal coffers of the Italian capital, a city so cash-strapped last year its council voted to pull out of contention for the 2024 Olympic Games. In a sign of the scandal’s civic weight, Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi was in the courtroom Thursday for the verdict.
“We are paying the price every day,” she told reporters later, referring to the fact that her city now struggles to fix roads or repair buses. “We now need to stitch the wound back together by taking the path of legality – no easy task. We need to keep our eyes peeled at all times.”
The situation Raggi is referring to is a political crisis that can be tracked back directly to years of unfettered graft and corruption.”It is an extremely difficult situation,” Giovanni Orsina, a contemporary history professor at LUISS University in Rome, explained to the Guardian last year. “The city is on its knees. The public services don’t work – notably rubbish collection and public transport – and the lobbies of those services are so strong that it would take a very powerful political force to fix them.”
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In this Dec. 2, 2014 handout photo Italian Carabinieri arrest Massimo Carminati, center, in Rome.
Carminati’s colorful bad man career stretches back decades and has reportedly taken on legendary proportions in the Italian underworld. Born in 1958, he initially operated on the blurred margin between neo-fascist groups and criminal gangs, according to ItalyChronicles.com. During the 1970s and 1980s he was a member of both Banda della Magliana, a criminal network that controlled activity in Rome, as well as Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, a right-wing terrorism group tied to a number of bank robberies and murders, including the 1980 bombing of a Bologna train station that resulted in the death’s of 85 people.
Carminati’s street cred soared after he survived – minus an eye – a close-range gunshot to his head from a police officer in 1981; along with his penchant for wiggling free from criminal charges, the wound elevated his untouchable status as well as landed him a new nickname – “The Pirate.” In 1998 he was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for his activities, but skirted two murder charges on technicalities.
In the scheme that would later derail Rome and become known “Mafia Capitale,” Carminati used bribes and threats to take control of city services and contracts for things like street maintenance and rubbish removal. According to an earlier report from The Washington Post, officials in Rome’s mayor’s office could be nudged to hand over lucrative contracts with $18,000 payoffs.
But the waves of immigrants arriving in Europe from war-torn Africa and the Middle East also provided a fresh revenue stream. Carminati and his associates embezzled money from the contracts to run housing for refugees, the Telegraph reported.”Do you have any idea how much I make on these immigrants?” Salvatore Buzzi, Carminati’s top lieutenant, was overheard saying on a wiretap. “Drug trafficking is less profitable”.
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In this Dec. 2, 2014 handout photo Italian Carabinieri arrest Massimo Carminati, center, in Rome.
Buzzi continued: “We closed this year with turnover of 40 million but . . . our profits all came from the gypsies, on the housing emergency and on the immigrants.”
Following the initial 2014 round up of Mafia Capitale associates, police reportedly seized $247 million in assets from the suspects, including works by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol hanging from the walls of Carminati’s home. Besides the arrests, investigators announced they were placing 100 additional businessmen and political figures under investigation.
But was the criminal activity linked to Italy’s infamous crime families? In terms of size, the group was “considered the fifth major organized crime ring in Italy after the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Naples, and the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia,” according to The Daily Beast. But the outfit lacked the organization of traditional mafia groups, and as the trial commenced, the state struggled to prove a link between the traditional crime families and Carminati.
Even so, throughout the 20-month judicial proceeding, both Carminati and Buzzi were held under the country’s 41-bis prison regime. The regulation allows for the suspension of prison accommodations for special prisoners, mainly mafia members. A prisoner under 41-bis is completely cut off from the outside world – no telephone; no letters with other prisoners; no meetings with third parties; no money or parcels from the outside; and no recreation. Carminati and Buzzi were not even present for their trials, but watched the proceedings on close-circuit screens from their respective cells.
This week of the 46 people on trial, five were acquitted. Buzzi was handed a 19-year-sentence. Carminati was sentenced to 20-years in prison. Had the court convicted the conspirators on mafia charges, however, the prison terms would have been longer. The prosecutor told Reuters he plans to appeal the court’s decision.
A former Mafia hit man in Canada who killed three people on the orders of underworld bosses has had his parole revoked for making threatening comments on social media.
“I got a pretty good lesson on political correctness,” Kenneth Murdock said when apologizing for his angry, booze-fuelled social media posts, one of which was aimed at a prison worker.
Murdock, 54, is serving a life sentence for three second-degree murders, extortion and conspiring to commit an indictable offense. In July he was returned to prison after two untoward posts on social media that he says were taken the wrong way.
He appeared before the parole board last week via a video link from prison to plead for release.
(Murdock legally changed his name in 2012 when he reintegrated from prison in Western Canada. Because he is a co-operating witness who testified against reputed Mafia bosses and is apparently progressing towards rehabilitation, the National Post is not publishing his new name.)
The board also heard from a victim, through a letter, and read a letter of support from his employer.
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Kenneth Murdock
Murdock was raised as a street tough in Hamilton, Ont., fast to fight and quick to win. His brawling talents and fearless nature were spotted and cultivated by the Musitano crime family, one of the city’s traditional Mafia clans. He served as a loyal and dedicated henchman who was willing to do anything for the family.
Once asked if he would kill someone for $1,000, Murdock replied: “If it was for the family, I would have done it for nothing.”
In 1985 he did his first mob hit, clattering a submachine gun into the garage where a 53-year-old factory janitor was working, targeted because he owed the family money and showed no sign of paying.
In 1997, Murdock took on a more challenging target. He boldly knocked on the Hamilton headquarters of John “Johnny Pops” Papalia, the long-reigning Mafia boss of Ontario who was a Musitano family rival. As they talked in the parking lot, Murdock pressed a .38-calibre revolver to the back of Papalia’s head and shot him dead.
Two months later, he was asked to kill Carmen Barillaro, a loyal lieutenant of Papalia’s in Niagara Falls who was looking to avenge his boss. Murdock knocked on Barillaro’s front door and shot him dead when he opened it.
Loyalty, however, has its limits.
When the mobsters Murdock says he was working for threatened to kill him — to “make me part of the compost,” he once told the Post — he became a co-operating witness. He testified that Pasquale (Pat) Musitano and his younger brother, Angelo Musitano, were behind his two most recent killings.
After serving 13 years of his life sentence, he was released on full parole.
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Pat Musitano
In 2010 his parole was revoked for drug use. He admitted he fell back into using cocaine and a year later he was released again.
He did well — maintaining a job, behaving appropriately, making friends and attending counseling — and was granted full parole in 2015. His motivation level and reintegration potential were rated high.
Then he got involved on social media.
In September 2016, he made a threatening statement in a social media post, but quickly retracted it, the parole board said.
Then, this July, he sent his former correctional officer a social media message that was taken as an ominous threat. He was arrested and returned to prison, resuming his life sentence until getting another shot at release.
Murdock did not intend the remark to be taken seriously as a threat, he said. He meant it to be a teasing comment and expected the officer to reply with a sarcastic retort, he told the parole board.
He said he thought he had a connection with the corrections officer and trusted him; he felt under pressure and wanted to chat to him and, while drinking, sent the message as a sort of icebreaker.
He now recognizes the message was inappropriate. “I took a good swipe at his dignity,” he told the parole board.
His apology was accepted. The board agreed there was no “malice or criminal intent” in his posts.
Given another chance, Murdock was ordered to stay off the booze and to reside at a specific place approved by the Correctional Service of Canada for six months.
He is still under previous parole conditions to not have any contact with any of his victims’ family members, not to associate with anyone involved in criminal activity including organized crime associates, and not to consume, purchase or possess drugs other than what is prescribed for him.
His parole revocation had serious ramifications: while in prison he lost his home and his job and his belongings were scattered among his friends.
